When Everything Is Blue(40)

The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I notice people passing by us, giving me way too much attention, some smiling and laughing. A football player actually points in my direction and bumps his buddy. Then they both start laughing their asses off. I glance down at my shirt, wondering if there’s a sign stuck there, then run a hand through my hair. I’m still self-accessing when my sister comes storming up to us.

“How could you do this to me, Theo? On my birthday?” she roars, her face an ugly shade of pissed.

“Do what?” I ask, while at the same time thinking I don’t want to know.

Tabs purses her lips and glances between Chris and me. Whatever it is, it’s bad, if even my sister is hesitating. She takes a deep breath and pulls up her phone, enters her password, and turns it toward me, her posture ramrod straight, her arm stiff enough to clothesline someone.

I can’t see what she’s talking about—there’s an overhead light bouncing off her phone and creating a glare—so I take it out of her hand to examine it closer. Chris comes up and peers over my shoulder.

And then I see it.

Holy shit, it’s bad.

It’s fucking terrible.

When I first started going online to look at skating and surf videos, my mother warned me to be careful what I searched for because there are some things I won’t be able to unsee. The picture on my sister’s phone is one of those images I’ll never be able to scrub from my mind. I know immediately Dave must have taken it. No one else has had me at this angle—on my knees, head back, eyes closed, with a mouthful of cock.

Cocksucker.

Uncle Theo’s words come back to haunt me, only this time I’m not laughing.

“Who sent you this?” Chris asks my sister. He’s snatched the phone from my hand and squeezes it as though the force from his fist alone could cause it to disintegrate.

“Who didn’t?” she says, and then only to Chris, maybe so I won’t hear, “It’s too late. It’s everywhere.”

“Who took this picture?” Chris glances at me, then each of our friends, trying to find the guilty party.

My vision blurs and my breath comes up short. I lean back against the lockers. The metal cuts into my shoulder blades as I struggle to keep from collapsing. It’s overwhelming, what this means. I’m out, like, naked in the middle of the hallway—no, worse, because it’s Dave’s cock filling my mouth, and the picture is so candid, you can tell I’m enjoying it. Damn, that shit is personal. Something’s been taken—no, stolen—from me, my most personal, private thing. And that thing has been smeared all over the walls to be judged and ridiculed by everyone who sees it.

“Fuck,” I mutter. The oxygen has been sucked out of my lungs, and I can’t get it back. Our friends are silent, eyes darting from me to Chris, perhaps seeing how we’re going to react. My sister demands her phone back, and Chris absently hands it to her.

My sister says something else shitty to me—what it is, I can hardly hear or process—then storms away. The only person who comes into focus is Chris, still demanding to know who sent this, and I can only figure he means whose cock is in my mouth. And I realize even the way I look at Chris is incriminating me and probably him too. I have to get out of here. Right now. I abandon my backpack completely and drop my deck at my feet—not the new one Chris gave me, which is safely stored in his car, but my old trusty that I don’t care if it gets abused. I hop on my magic carpet and skate blindly down the hallway. A teacher calls out to me, but I kickflip a curb onto the walkway, sprint through the lawn, and drop my board on the sidewalk off school grounds. I pump my legs until I’m flying, hardly bothering with stop signs or traffic. My anger and adrenaline fuel me until I don’t even realize how far I’ve gone.

I’ve been violated, outed in the worst possible way. Only Dave could have done this, but why? Spite? Anger? Jealousy? What an awful, hateful thing to do, which makes me question everything I thought I knew about Dave and what we did together. I feel cheap and dirty and used and stupid. So fucking stupid. Betrayed. The list goes on and on.

It’s not that I’m ashamed of being gay, or even sucking off Asshole Dave—yeah, the name is back. It’s the complete and utter violation of my privacy and having that on display for everyone at Sabal Palm High to judge and hate on. It’s the same reason I never show off my skateboarding tricks until I’ve practiced them to perfection.

I hate looking stupid.

I need to focus on something constructive. I check my phone for the address of the nearest DMV. It’s too far to skate, so I pull up the city bus routes and make my way to the nearest bus stop. There’s a young mother there with three kids under the age of five. The baby’s crying and the middle one keeps trying to totter out into traffic, and the oldest one looks like he’s tired of the bullshit. I wonder how she got to this place of having three kids and waiting on the bus, which, let’s be real, in South Florida kind of sucks. And then I figure that somewhere along the way, a man must have betrayed her, kind of like my own dad betrayed my mom, kind of like how Asshole Dave betrayed me, and even though I don’t know her, I can relate to her struggle, so I offer to keep her one kid out of the street while letting the other one mess around with my skateboard and she tries, in vain, to get the baby to stop crying. But the baby keeps on screaming because life is hard, and even this kid, at six months old, knows it.